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30 Sep 09

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset | Video on TED.com

An amazing presentation by Hans Rosling about world health & economic data, his site (gapminder.org), the "bottom billion," and ...well, blowing cliches about health and wealth out of the water. Also see Rosling's 10 answers to 10 questions video: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-and-reddits-10-questions-to-hans-rosling/

www.ted.com/...hans_rosling_at_state.html - Preview

ted_conference data video statistics hans_rosling demographics gapminder

03 Dec 08

Is Urban Loneliness a Myth? by Jennifer Senior -- New York Magazine

Another fascinating New York Magazine article, showing that 1 out 2 apartments in Manhattan are occupied by singles ...and that their occupants are not lonely or alienated.
QUOTE
Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of loneliness researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth.
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nymag.com/52450 - Preview

urbanism manhattan nyc myths loneliness demographics nymag

04 Aug 08

"Trading Places" by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

www.tnr.com/...story.html - Preview

cities downtown creative_cities suburbs gentrification trends urbanization urban_renewal demographics

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
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- Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
- If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.
- We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

19 May 08

The Big Sort - Bill Bishop w/ Robert G. Cushing - Book Review by Scott Stossel - New York Times

Informative review of Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. It's intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It's almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people "sorting" themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting? :)

Also of course fascinating in Stossel's review/ Bishop's book are the observations on "the big sort"'s effect on politics, and that homogenous communities tend to be more cantakerous because they're so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogenous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes "solutions" less "obvious," but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things -- vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING -- going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely *must* think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it "hurts" what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They're totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the "different" communities

www.nytimes.com/...Stossel-t.html - Preview

big_sort demographics democracy trends bill_bishop

Superficially, the phenomenon Bishop is examining is not new, and the litany of division he recites is familiar. The two major political parties have become more extreme and can’t find common ground anymore. National civic groups and mainline church denominations have withered away, replaced by smaller, more narrowly focused independent groups. Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.
This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. This is where “The Big Sort,” which grew out of a series of articles that Bishop, formerly a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, wrote with Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist and statistician from the University of Texas, is both wonkiest and most original.
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- “By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable.”
- American migration is now inspired at least as much by “lifestyle” choices as by economics. “We have built a country,” Bishop writes, “where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”
  - Substitute "city" for "country," and you're close to describing Victoria, where ideological inbreeding is in some groups so advanced that its members can't understand "'those people' who live just a few miles away" [i.e., in Vancouver]. Instead, it's all about how "we don't want to be 'just' another Vancouver." That's sorting at work, right here. It's great that Bishop et al. call that into question; here (in Victoria), it's taken as a good thing: that we're "different" from them, etc., but if you look at the whole picture, is it a good thing? Not when it thwarts the city's economy. - on 2008-05-19
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- Bishop argues that this clustering of like with like accelerated in the tumult of the 1960s when, unmoored from the organizations and traditions that had guided their choices about how to live, Americans grew anxious and disoriented — and reflexively sought comfort in the familiar, cocooning themselves in communities of people like themselves. This sorting was compounded in the 1980s and ’90s as the clustering of educated people in certain cities produced regional wage disparities — which in turn attracted more-highly educated people to the richer cities, which in turn accentuated the economic disparities between cities, creating a cycle of division that shows little sign of relenting.
- Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does. Psychological studies suggest that the mere fact of division, even when there is no substantive content to it, can be corrosive: in a series of experiments in the 1950s and ’60s, groups of similar people arbitrarily divided into subgroups quickly exploded into conflicts of “Lord of the Flies”-like intensity. Other studies have shown that when relatively like-minded people are grouped together, they don’t settle around the average point of view of the individuals in the group but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they’re already inclined. This gives clustering a powerful self-reinforcing quality, and helps explain how American counties have hardened into such immovable political clumps. “It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal or a federal appeals court judge,” Bishop writes. “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”
- The founding fathers didn’t need social psychology experiments to understand that homogeneity could be dangerous. In their wisdom, they created a system of government that called for constant conversation and compromise among competing interests — what Alexander Hamilton called the “jarring of parties.”

02 May 08

"How to Foster Tech Entrepreneurship" by Vivek Wadhwa (Business Week)

Report on research by Vivek Wadhwa, "a former tech entrepreneur, ...Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and an executive-in-residence at Duke University." Turns out that the idea that tech entrepreneurs are predominantly Mark Zuckerberg's age are exagerrated/ wrong.

Another interesting finding is that lack of health insurance holds many older potential entrepreneurs back. (Yet Canada has affordable universal health insurance, but the US easily overtakes it in the entrepreneurship category.)

Additional insights also re. education and training.

businessweek.com/...sb20080430_430663.htm - Preview

entrepreneurship business_week demographics startups

Startup hotshots are older and more educated than generally thought; it follows that training and finance skills should be offered to all age groups
recent research I helped lead at Duke and Harvard shows that most U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs are middle-aged and well-educated.
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- Twice as many tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their 50s as do those in their early 20s, according to our research.
- Contrary to the popular belief that tech entrepreneurs start their companies in their teens or early 20s, we found that the average and median age of founders was 39. Twice as many were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And there were twice as many over 60 as under 20. So, we may read stories about young people starting tech companies (BusinessWeek.com, 4/17/08), but they're the minority. Most tech entrepreneurs have grey hair and experience.
  - - who would have guessed...? - on 2008-05-02
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- Very few tech entrepreneurs dropped out of college to start their companies. We found the vast majority (92%) of founders held bachelor's degrees, 31% held master's degrees, and 10% had completed PhDs. Nearly half of these degrees were in science-, technology-, engineering-, and mathematics-related disciplines. And one-third were in business, accounting, and finance.
- Only 8% graduated from Ivy League schools.
- But that was significantly higher than their proportion of all graduates. In other words, you don't need to graduate from an elite university to become an entrepreneur, but graduates of Ivy League schools were more likely to become entrepreneurs than others.
  - - a greater competitive streak? Or just more competition drilled into them from a young age? - on 2008-05-02
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- Founders holding MBA degrees established their companies the soonest compared to other advanced-degree holders—an average of 13 years after graduation. Master's-degree holders took 14.7 years and bachelor's degree holders took 16.7 years. Those with PhDs typically waited 21 years.
  - - those with PhDs are likely too heavily invested in institutional academia/ research to make the entrepreneurship leap quickly - on 2008-05-02
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- Our findings raise questions about how to best foster tech entrepreneurship. It is clear that education provides significant advantage, but most of these would-be entrepreneurs spend years in the workforce before starting their companies. That means if we want to boost entrepreneurship, we need to understand what might be keeping middle-aged workers from starting their own businesses. The next upstarts won't all be found in the university business-plan contests—they'll be found in the workplace.
- Last year, the Kauffman Foundation, which sponsors some of my research, released a working paper titled "On the Road to an Entrepreneurial Economy". It found that health-care costs were a major concern for entrepreneurs and U.S. businesses in general.
- It also suggested that school curricula be adapted to foster not just excellence in science and mathematics, but also creativity and entrepreneurial thinking among students.